Day 276 of 1827: Things I Don't Take for Granted Anymore, Bathroom Edition

I think I’ve finally figured out how to take a shower.  It turns out I’ve been doing it wrong almost the entire time I’ve been living in this apartment.

See, at the place where I’m living, we don’t have a water heater with a tank.  Instead, we have a gas heater that flames up when you open the hot water tap and makes the water nice and steamy — on-demand style.

Now the way that this water heater works, it all goes off of volume.  The more water you pump through it, the hotter it gets… but if you don’t have enough going through it, the heater won’t activate at all, and you’ll be stuck with ice-cold water instead.

This makes it a little tricky to take a shower.

Normally, you adjust the faucets so that you get a nice mix of hot and cold water.  Simple enough.

But with this particular heater, it’s more like this:  You add some hot water to get the heater to turn on, and then you progressively “add” cold water, which really just decreases the amount of water running through the heater, which turns down the flame and makes the temperature survivable.

Oh, and the water heater’s all the way in the kitchen, so when I’m taking a shower, there’s about a 20 second delay after I change the configuration of the knobs before I feel a change in the water temperature.

And if I turn up the cold water too high and the water heater shuts off, I have no warning.  20 seconds later, the water turns to ice!

Now, as if this wasn’t complicated enough, the building that we’re in is a little old and has problems with water pressure.  Pretty much, if somebody else in the building starts using a lot of water, then the water pressure in our apartment drops a little bit.

Remember what I said before about the water heater shutting off if not enough water is running through it?

So up until very recently, my strategy was to turn the hot water all the way on, and then give it maybe a quarter of a turn on the cold water faucet.  Then I would very carefully add more cold bit by bit until I got to a comfortable temperature.

It’s very important to go really slow on the cold water because if you miss and make the water heater shut off, you’ve got to go back to zero and start over.

And smack the shower head to the side so that you don’t get blasted by sleet.

However, as I said, I’ve been doing this wrong the whole time.  See, I thought that I should turn the hot water all the way on to get a good flow through the water heater to make it less sensitive to water pressure problems.

But what I noticed is that this makes it really difficult to get that balance of hot and cold just right.  It’s kind of like turning up the gain all the way on a microphone — even the slightest movement maxes out the signal.

So instead (and why I wasn’t doing it this way all along, I’ll never know), if I just treat it like any other system and try to shoot for a good balance of hot and cold, I (generally) will have an easy and comfortable showering experience.

Sometimes the water will go cold on me because somebody somewhere in Santiago flushed a toilet and stole my precious water pressure, but for the most part I’m able to have a relatively normal shower with a minimum of swearing and jumping out of range of the shower head.

…

It just occurred to me that my roommate is trying to rent out his room while he’s in the States, and I probably shouldn’t be posting this, at least not until after we find a renter.

Did I mention that I finally figured out how to work the controls, and my showers here are now quite pleasant?  *Bambi-eyed look of innocence*

Speaking of things I don’t take for granted anymore, they just got finished building this new BBVA branch… … and the ATM is already out of service.